Sergey Brin: The Video Lecture

Several weeks ago Danny blogged about Professor Marti Hearst’s “awesome” UC Berkeley class featuring many presentations by some of the biggest names in the search biz including Battelle, Pedersen, Norvig, Dumais, Horowitz and MANY others. Even more exciting, all of the lectures are on the web and archived.

This past week it was Sergey Brin’s turn to speak to SIMS 141: Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business.

I haven’t had a chance to watch Brin’s presentation yet, I will, but this news release offers a few highlights and quotes:

Casual and relaxed, Brin talked about how Google came to be, answered students’ questions, and showed that someone worth $11 billion (give or take a billion) still can be comfortable in an old pair of blue jeans.

…it was his unspoken message that was most powerful: To those with focus and passion, all things are possible.

Simple ideas sometimes can change the world, he said.

On Wikipedia: This is a simple idea ? one you would assume would not work, but it does, said Brin. One reason is scale: it taps the power and potential of a global audience.

We believed we could build a better search. We had a simple idea, that not all pages are created equal. Some are more important,” related Brin.

On Other Companies — Microsoft?

Burning up time and energy worrying about what other companies are doing is a mistake, he said. Instead, think about where you and your enterprise are going, your ambitions and your hopes.

Brin also touched on free speech issues in China and what role, if any, Google could play in ending the digital divide.

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.